About the Program In December 1986, we performed our first concert program, Legends of St. Nicholas, at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The audience was not large, to say the least; but never mind, because we knew that we had found something to keep us passionately engaged for a long time, with any luck at all. In The Last Noel, we’ve created a special concert to celebrate our five Christmas programs, and our years together. We offer this as our gift to you, our listeners, who have helped to make it all possible. We begin with five songs from the magnificent 13th century. Our first recording, An English Ladymass, opens with the lovely Irish prosa Gaude Virgo Salutata from the Dublin Troper (c. 1400) and Edi beo thu, a two-voice strophic devotional song in early middle English. The prophetic Balaam de quo vaticinans / [Ballam] is typically English, with jolly rondellus (voice exchange) sections superimposed on the basic motet structure. Gabriel fram heven-king is a version of the very popular Annunciation song Angelus ad virginem, mentioned in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Lullay my child: This ender nithgt (solo: Ruth Cunningham) is a musical reconstruction from a refrain fragment in a 15th-century English manuscript. The story of the infant Jesus’s prophetic and miraculous conversation with his mother recurs often in old British poetry and song. The poem Peperit virgo, from the 14th-century Yorkshire Red Book of Ossory, is meant to be sung to the tune of the secular song Brid one breere, an early example of “Why should the devil get all the good tunes?” The late medieval British carol is a choral song with verses and burdens (refrains). In these two 15th-century carols, Ecce quod natura and Now may we syngen, we have added new lines using fauxbourdon technique, creating parallel chords in a rich, full harmony. The l4th-century sequence (liturgical poem in double versicles) O ceteris preamabilis is triadic throughout, creating an unmistakably English soundscape. Haunting and rhythmically free, the traditional Irish hymn An teicheahd go hÉigipt (solo: Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek) tells, in the style of the ancient bards, the story of Joseph, Mary and the child Jesus’ flight into Egypt.

Also from An English Ladymass, the strophic song Salve virgo virginum has the tight triadic harmony that kept us coming back to medieval English music. Our last program must honor our first. From Legends of St. Nicholas, the rhythmic hymn Intonent hodie catalogs the well-known miracles of the saint. The brief song Sainte nicholaes, by the English mystic Godric of Yorkshire (d. 1170), is one of the oldest in the English language. Godric was a contemporary of Hildegard of Bingen and, like her, was said to have received his songs in visions of mystical beings. We have harmonized his melody in typical English fashion. Gaudens in domino is a medieval German two-voice song, with our own polyphonic embellishment (written by Johanna Rose). The 13th-century French conductus Nicholai presulis is a merry masterpiece. Can wassel is a traditional Cornish wassail song in two parts; we’ve added a “bass line” to its jolly refrain. We close our program with songs from early America. The Cherry-Tree Carol (solo: Marsha Genensky) which dates at least as far back as the 15th century, remains one of the most commonly collected ballads in America and in the British Isles. The Christmas lyric Hail the blest morn! exists in more than one early American folk hymn setting. This one, from the Southern Harmony of 1835, uses Star in the East as its refrain. A British setting of the lyric A Virgin Unspotted was popular in the American colonies, and 18th-century American tunesmith William Billings set it again, in his Judea. Billings and other American composers, taking as their model the fugal movements of English choral works, wrote many imitative 4-part fuging tunes like Rainbow and Billings’ joyous Bethlehem. The music in this program spans hundreds of years, from St. Godric’s mystical vision-born song, to the living, traditional Christmas songs of Ireland and America. The styles and textures vary greatly; the texts speak with many voices. But despite all the technical diversity, we sense a common purpose in these works. As if in response to the quiet force of a supernatural moment, when the paths of humanity and divinity meet, the composers of these songs marked each piece with some special characteristic, making each a universe in itself, and making each a unique artistic response to the Christmas story.

Susan Hellauer